Our Lady of the Angels School Fire

As long as I'm reminiscing about things in the Chicago area when I was a kid, I might as well talk about the Our Lady of the Angels School fire.

In the late summer of 1958, my family moved to Oak Park, IL. Dad had been put on inactive duty with the Navy. We had returned from Japan to my grandparents' farm in Streator while Dad scrambled to find a civilian job after so very many years of being a naval officer. He took a job as Industrial Arts teacher in Elmwood Park. Somehow, Mom and Dad found a big ol' house in Oak Park, not far from Dad's school, to rent. (I say "somehow" because my parents handled all of the family business away from us kids. I don't ever remember hearing anything about his interviewing for jobs or their home search. We were told when the decisions were made. It all happened by magic, I'm sure!)

I was ten years old, starting 6th grade in a new school--again.
One day in early December, I came home to the news that a parochial school in Chicago had caught fire and that many, many children and a few adults had died--92 sticks in my mind. It was a horrible tragedy--all over the media. No one ever really determined the origin of the fire to place blame, but it seems that a student started a fire in a trash container in the school's basement near the wooden staircase. The fire raced up the stairs of the multiple-story building, fanned by the updraft in the staircase, destroying the main avenue of escape. Students were crowded at windows for air. Some jumped. Neighbors rushed to the school with ladders that didn't even hit the second floor. The fire department was met with a locked gate that delayed their getting to the school in time to do much good. One whole class died of smoke inhalation at their desks because there was no escape for them, and their teacher told them to pray and wait for the firemen. Others were burned to death. Some of the children who had escaped were taken in by local friends, and no one knew for hours what had happened to them. Families awaited word on what had happened to their children, some of which were in different classes. It was awful.

That fire left a mark on me. I was impressionable. I was at an age at which I figured that what happened to those kids could happen to me. And I came to understand the anguish of the families who had lost children that day.

The very next afternoon, just after lunch at my school, the fire alarm rang. There was no laughing or joking around. Every student filed out of the building in a sombre fashion. It was only a drill, brought on, perhaps, by the events of the previous day. But I never forgot it.

Twelve years later, I became a teacher in an old school building with wooden stairs. We had frequent fire drills, one of which each year included having the staircase blocked so we had to use the fire escape. The kids rarely took it seriously...and that affected me. No matter where I taught after that, with the first fire drill of the year, I told my classes about the Our Lady of the Angels fire. Did they listen? I'm not sure. But I told them, nonetheless. They needed to know.

The aftermath of that fire had far-reaching effects all over the country. Many laws were passed to help deter similar situations--only one of which was that wooden staircases had to be enclosed with doors at top and bottom to prevent updrafts. There are people still living who endured that fire, as victims or survivors. I think of them several times a year... You can look it up on the Internet. It was a very big deal.